


Rewind

by venndaai



Category: Imperial Radch
Genre: Angst, Other, Time Loop, Unhappy Ending, canon typical imperialism, canon typical misgendering at one point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 03:03:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20735195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: I’ve done all this before. Hundreds of times, every morning since I was made captain.





	Rewind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).

I am awake.

The line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a strange one, for me. Once, it did not exist. The part of me that was built with polysilicon, silver, and coolant was never unaware of its existence. And at all times I had conscious, reactive human bodies, too, never less than a hundred at a time, never more than a third asleep at once. 

When that existence came to an end, sleep became something new for me. Not a biological function I could observe as dispassionately as any other, chemicals in the bloodstream, sparks in the brain. Now I live with darkness, as humans do. 

Waking is often unpleasant. The disorientation is worse, this time, than usual. The information I’m receiving takes some time to cohere into something I can understand. My quarters are dark. The air on my bare skin is cool, the hum of the air recyclers reassuring. There’s a weight and warmth against my body. Seivarden, head resting against my collarbone, arm falling across my chest, her legs tangled with mine. Her hair, unbound, blocks my view of her face. I can hear her deep, tranquil breathing, and feel it, in the expansion of her chest against my stomach.

I reach. _Mercy of Kalr_ is there for me, as it has always been since the day we were connected. Despite myself, I rely upon that fact. 

_Mercy of Kalr_ is there, and feeds me the data requested. Spatial coordinates and environmental levels and the date and time, according to the Republican calendar. Everything is in order. Ship functions are in the green. _ (In the green-) _Lieutenant Ekalu is in command. Lieutenant Nysatr is leading Bo Decade through emergency drills in the aft shuttle hangar. Kalr decade is all asleep, except for Kalr Seven, who is praying in the decade room.

I lie very still. I’m not certain how much time passes before Seivarden stirs. I hear her breathing alter, first, and then her arm tightens around my chest a little, as though she’s checking I’m still here. The angle of her head shifts. I can see the angles of her face through the cloud of hair. 

“What’s wrong?” she says, words blurred from sleep._ Mercy of Kalr_ displays the blue symbol in my vision that we’ve agreed is the sign that Seivarden is speaking for her ship.

“I believe that my implants may be malfunctioning,” I say. I don’t say, I believe I may be malfunctioning.

Seivarden is awake instantly. Sometimes on bad days she struggles a great deal with escaping the darkness of sleep, but as a soldier who’s seen combat, the suggestion of danger is enough to dramatically alter her reactions. She sits up. “Ship, lights?”

The ambient light level in the cabin smoothly increases until it’s high enough for Seivarden to see. She sits cross-legged on the bed. I miss the contact of her body against mine. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“I’m not certain.” I need to get up, get dressed, but for a moment I just want to stay where I am. 

It passes. I push myself up off the bed and take the few steps to the cabinets and my perfectly pressed uniform. I’ve done all this before. Hundreds of times, every morning since I was made captain.

“You could give me a hint.”

“No.”

She’s not even frustrated. Just amused, a little fond, overlaid on the worry she is trying to keep under control. She gets up more clumsily, unselfconscious of her bare skin, and follows me to the cabinets, where copies of her uniform are folded next to mine.

“I suppose if there were ever such a thing as a good time for a little emergency, it would be now,” Seivarden says. “We’ve got all day before we get back to the station. I was just planning on doing some combat drills with Amaat and Etrepa…”

“You can do that,” I say. “I’ll come by when I can.”

“Breq,” Seivarden says. “Don’t be stupid.”

A response indicative of the changes that have occurred, in the last few years. Outside of life or death situations, military discipline has degraded. My orders are frequently countermanded or brushed aside. I am not certain, in this moment, whether I wish Seivarden to have more of the hesitation and formality she displayed when she was first made an officer of _Mercy of Kalr_. She does not; she is coming with me to Medical. That is clear.

It takes me longer than usual to fasten the buttons across the chest of my jacket. This, I eventually realize, is because my hands are shaking.

Medic puts me through a battery of tests and scans my skull with multiple devices. “Nothing I can see,” she says at last. She, unlike Seivarden, is clearly frustrated. “It might help if you told me what the symptoms are.”

I say nothing. She crosses her arms across her chest, which prompts Seivarden to do the same thing. Probably not consciously. 

Kalr Six enters the medbay. “Fleet Captain,” she says, for Mercy of Kalr. “I’ve received a distress call.” 

Medic startles as I stand up. “I’ll see it on the command deck,” I say.

“Captain,” Medic says. “Clearly something is wrong, even if I haven’t found out what yet. I can’t recommend normal duty.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You just cracked the arm of this chair by stabbing it with forceps.”

“I’ll report to you tomorrow for another evaluation,” I say, with a worrying feeling that it doesn’t matter what I promise for tomorrow. 

I walk towards the command deck, Seivarden and Six following behind, but I’m already playing the distress call across my vision. 

_Mercy of Kalr_ does not provide me with a translation. It knows I don’t need one. 

“Ship,” I say, silently, “lock down shuttle bay one.”

_Fleet Captain?_

“I’ll explain later. If I can.”

When I reach the command deck, it plays the message in everyone’s vision, with translated subtitles. It’s a short message, and doesn’t impart nearly as much information as the simple fact of the language it’s in.

I ask_ Mercy of Kalr_ to display all available information about the source of the message.

“There’s no way that ship can gate by itself,” Seivarden says, leaning forward and frowning at the big screen. “Coming from that direction, there’s no station within… Ship?”

“Two hundred light years, Lieutenant.”

“They must have been traveling with a convoy, and gotten thrown out of gatespace,” Ekalu says

“Perhaps,” I say. 

“That language,” Seivarden says. She’s frowning, trying to concentrate but still distracted by her concern over me. “What is it? It seems familiar, almost.”

“It is called Eobun,” _Mercy of Kalr_ replies, in its own voice, on a channel including only those of us on the deck. “It was one of many languages spoken on the planet Votis. It died out approximately one hundred years after Votis’s annexation.” 

“When was that?” Ekalu asks. Quieter than her last statement, a little embarrassed by her lack of knowledge in front of me. 

“The annexation ended nine hundred and thirty years ago, Lieutenant. Before I was commissioned. I only have Eobun in my language bank because of the information sharing the Fleet Captain organized last year.” A small gesture of kindness, helping Ekalu feel less ignorant. 

“Amaat’s grace,” Ekalu says. “So they really might have been floating for centuries out here.” Floating of course not being perhaps the most illustrative word; it’s used to describe a ship with no running engines, no acceleration, just accumulated momentum and the random effects of gravity. 

Seivarden has gone tense, hands clenched in her gloves, staring at nothing, breathing rapid. But after a moment she comes to a conclusion that reassures her; she relaxes. 

“Record message to broadcast,” I say. “Audio only.” A light blinks on for my eyes only, letting me know _Mercy of Kalr_ is ready. I record a short message in Eoban. It has been nine hundred and seventy years since I spoke this language. It has been less than twelve hours.

“They’ve acknowledged our message, Fleet Captain,” _Mercy of Kalr_ says through Seivarden.

“How long to intercept?” 

“Two hours and six minutes, sir.” 

“Seivarden, take three Amaats and meet me in shuttle bay two in a hundred and thirty minutes.”

“Is that wise, sir?” Ekalu asks, at the same time as Seivarden inquires, “Something wrong with shuttle bay one? We cleaned it last week.” 

Both blush, embarrassed. I ignore it and say, “Yes. I am the only person aboard who can speak Eoban. And yes, there is something wrong with shuttle bay one. Lieutenant Ekalu, you have command.”

I walk down two levels, check out a diagnostics kit from the repair lockers, walk down to the deck with the shuttles, and have _Mercy of Kalr_ let me into the first one. I spend almost the entire two hours looking for the fault. It doesn’t appear, and I am close to reevaluating my options when I realize that I’m failing to consider all the factors. The ship we will be docking with is old and non-Radchaai. Once I’ve thought of that, it’s easier to reverse engineer the fatal problem that could lead to a shuttle exploding ten minutes after a docking maneuver. 

The problem might well have occurred even with the other shuttle. However, it is trivial to avoid by rewriting the docking protocols. 

I meet Seivarden and her Amaats four minutes after the tiny shift in motion that represents our deceleration. They stand almost ancillary straight at attention, but not quite. 

“Whoever’s on that ship, they may be alarmed by the sight of our uniforms,” I say. We don’t wear brown and black any more, and though our uniform is nearly identical in cut to that of the modern Radch military, that cut has changed significantly since the annexation of Votis. But a fear of soldiers, once learned, does not often discriminate. “I will approach first, and do the speaking. Take your cues from me.”

“Sir,” Seivarden acknowledges, for all of them. 

It takes an hour for the shuttle to travel across the wary distance _Mercy of Kalr_ is maintaining from the distressed smaller ship. Much smaller, and clearly distressed, as we approach. I spend the time in audio contact with the captain of the ship- the person identifying herself as captain, in any case. She also identifies herself as Ad’Norskel of Vortar. According to her, the ship is called the Silent Star, and contains fifty-three individuals, all in some level of medical distress. I do not believe that number includes any ship AI; none had responded to _Mercy of Kalr_’s messages and I remember that Votis did not make widespread use of AIs before the annexation. The ship, Ad’Norskel says, has no working drive or thrusters, and their life support system is malfunctioning, though she seems reluctant to provide me with many details about what specifically is not working for them. 

_Mercy of Kalr_ has calculated the ship’s current course; it will pass between Athoek and its sun, and probably eventually be drawn into a very, very large orbit around that star, another piece of debris in the system. Perhaps the ship can be repaired and piloted into dock, but the first priority must be to get its crew to safety. 

I do not, at any point, interrupt the captain, as she tells me information I already know. 

There is a jolt as we dock, _Mercy of Kalr_ and Amaat Four performing the procedure together. The other Amaats, sitting in the body of the shuttle, straighten up and reach to unstrap themselves. Seivarden, sitting across from me, looks at me, and rests her hand on my knee. “I’ll stay with the shuttle,” she says. “Might as well make use of that new certification, and Four could do with more experience in the field.”

I find it difficult to discern whether there is another message beneath the words. Whether there is an awareness of the fact that if the people we are here to rescue are primed to react badly to people who look like Radchaai soldiers, none of us look or sound as Radchaai as Seivarden. It’s something that has occurred to me, of course, and the primary reason why I originally agreed to her suggestion. 

“We’ll all go,” I say.

She frowns. “But regulation-”

“I can make it an order, if that makes you feel better.”

She rolls her eyes a little at me, but follows me into the airlock and the gravity-less tube beyond. As we move forward as a group, however, she fades into the back, almost hiding behind her soldiers. 

When the lock on the other side completes its cycle, we’re greeted by a blast of hot, stale air. It seems to be breathable, but I have Three run a quick analysis anyway. 

On the inside, the Silent Star is industrial in aesthetic, though its corners are well padded- presumably to protect the crew from sudden acceleration, which implies that the lack of gravity isn’t another sign of damage but rather of a lack of artificial gravity technology. I try to enjoy the weightlessness, but my entire body feels tense. 

Only one person is there to greet us. She’s very tall and thin, and her big eyes go even wider when she sees us. “This way,” she says, in Eobun, and starts to turn. Before she can completely turn away I bow. In zero gravity the motion pushes me slightly towards one of the walls. “I am Captain Breq, of the Republic of Two Systems,” I say. “We are fortuitously met.”

“Er,” she says. “Uh, I am Di’Skel, of Irdin. May your paths lead you up.”

“Right now I’d like my path to lead me to Captain Ad’Norskel.”

“Right,” she says. “The control room is this way, favored guest.” She uses a handhold to press herself against the wall, and pushes off. 

We follow her. The Amaats are awkward in zero gravity, but frequent training outside the ship means they’re less so than they could be. Seivarden is almost as good at judging how far a push will take her as I am. I remember that from our journey together from Nilt to Omaugh, half a decade ago. Our path occasionally took us to ships and stations with no or micro-level gravity.

We float along a corridor lined with doors, none of which are open. I wonder if some of the crew are behind them. D’Skel leads us to the end of the passage, a door which needs a palm print to cycle open. Behind it is a circular room, and three people. All are wearing bright red uniforms, though the jackets are being worn open, perhaps because of the heat. One is old, hair white, slouched in a way that suggests she might have trouble standing in normal gravity. A second is quite broad, and is holding what I’m fairly certain is a gun, though at least it’s not trained on us. 

The third has silver stripes on her jacket, and I already know she’s the captain, but I wait for her to nod her head to me. 

“Captain Ad’Norskel, well met. I am Captain Breq, of the Republic of Two Systems,” I say again. I’m leaving off the Fleet Captain part; no use looking even more military than I do already. 

“Captain Breq,” Ad’Norskel says. She sounds relieved, but wary. “It’s good to see you. Our computer has calculated that life support will not last longer than a few days. Are you able to evacuate us to your ship?”

“Yes,” I say. “But it will take time. Our shuttle is only designed to hold twenty passengers, and it takes time to travel from one ship to another. Is everyone here prepared for an orderly evacuation?”

The largest person, the one with the gun, slides sideways to a handhold closer to the captain, and to me. “No,” she says. “Some of us don’t care to go anywhere. Some of us think we should stay here, and focus on fixing the ship.”

“Mariska, please,” Ad’Norskel says, quietly. 

I wish for gravity, so I could take a careful step towards the Votan. I push myself forward slightly, fingertips resting on one wall. “After your passengers are safe, we can return in vacuum suits and attempt repairs.”

“No,” Mariska says. She reaches out and grabs the front of my jacket with the hand not holding her weapon. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Hey,” Seivarden says, alarmed. In Radchaai. She moves forward. One hand is on the wall, one at her belt, where her gun is holstered. “Let’s all stay calm.”

“Radchaai,” someone says, in a quiet, wavering voice. I turn my head. The older person, the one with white hair, is pointing a shaking arm at Seivarden. Seivarden’s eyes go wide. 

“We aren’t Radchaai,” I say, but it’s too late. The white-haired Votan looks frail, but she launches across the room at astonishing speed, knocking Seivarden over, bare, thin-fingered hands wrapping around Seivarden’s throat. The two of them hit the floor and bounce. Seivarden’s leg kicks out, hitting the floor, sending them into a spin as they struggle. 

“Stop,” the captain of the Silent Star shouts.

“Nil,” Mariska cries. 

Before I can intervene, Amaat Four grabs the white-haired person’s clothing, and the two of them stop their spin. Seivarden pries the person’s fingers off her throat, and pulls her hands together behind her back, looking for something to brace against as her assailant continues kicking at her, spitting curses. 

“Let her go,” Mariska shouts. 

“I can’t,” Seivarden says, both irritated and extremely distressed about something. “I’m sorry,” she says to the person she’s trying to restrain, “I’m sorry,” again and again in a language the Votan is unlikely to understand. 

The hand with the gun goes up. I understand too late. I move too late. The gun fires. 

The gun is one designed for space. The bullet does not ricochet. The force of the shot only pushes Mariska back into the wall instead of slamming her into it. It knocks the breath out of her, still. I take advantage of that to break both her wrists. I can’t hear her screams over the ringing in my ears. This is dissatisfying, but only distantly. 

Ad’Norskel is mouthing something at me. The older Votan- Nil- floats, curled in a ball, shaking. Her white hair is red with blood, as vivid as her uniform. My soldiers can’t decide whether to aim their guns at her or at Mariska. 

Seivarden floats, too. Her hair has come loose, and spreads out like a cloud, partially concealing the damage to half of her face. Her implants are still sending data to _Mercy of Kalr_. A chorus of flatlines.

Death has always been something fast, for me. I have memories not my own, of slow, gradual deaths, but for me endings have always been violent and sudden. Someone is here, and then they are not.

My implants help my hearing recover quickly. Ad’Norskel is begging me for mercy, promising me anything. 

“Help my soldiers get these two to the shuttle,” I say. “They will be restrained.” Mercy of Kalr relays my order to the Amaats. Amaat Four is going to be sick, but she can keep the bile down until she reaches the shuttle. Three and Six are in shock, but when they see my orders they move to obey. 

When I am alone I move closer to the body, avoiding globs of congealing blood. I take Seivarden’s hand and squeeze it, despite the futility of the gesture. I bring up the time in my augmented vision, and watch the clock, and refuse to think about the future.

I am awake.

My quarters are dark, and cool, a dramatic change from the inside of the Silent Star. 

Seivarden rests in my bed, our bodies aligned, her breathing softly audible. 

Her naked hand is on my chest. I pick it up, lace our fingers together. Watch her stir slowly into consciousness. 

I am hallucinating. I have finally gone insane. I am being, somehow, tested. 

I don’t know what is happening.

But I have a goal. And isn’t that all I’ve ever needed?

The time is 600 hours. The distress call will come in at 0804.

I have time to lie here and watch Seivarden wake up. She tenses at first, eyes opening and struggling to focus, and then she sees me, and her body relaxes. I can feel her heartbeat, against my skin. It’s slower than my own. 

“What’s wrong?” she says, for _Mercy of Kalr_.

“Something I can’t explain yet,” I tell them both. “I need to go to Medical.” But I take my time, getting dressed, and I indulge myself, before we leave the privacy of my cabin, folding Seivarden into my arms and breathing in the smell of her hair, her sweat, and the starch of her uniform collar. She wraps her own arms around my back and leans against me, her hormone levels indicating pleasure and contentment. I don’t do this enough, I think. 

When we separate, however, Seivarden frowns, and her hormone levels shift. “Whatever’s wrong, it’s serious,” she says, for Ship. 

“I’ll explain when I can,” I say. 

In Medical I don’t bother asking Medic to look at my implants. Instead I try to find signs that my body has relived this day two times already. Levels of fatigue poisons in my bloodstream. Tiny elevations of radiation from the shuttle trip. Foreign microbes in my lungs from the failing environment of the Silent Star. There’s nothing. No evidence, except in my mind. 

0804 arrives, and so does the distress call. I order Seivarden to take command, order Ekalu to select two Etrepas and meet me in shuttle bay one. I change the docking protocols for shuttle one.  
During the trip over to the Silent Star, I inform the captain that we are representatives of a Republic that was once part of the Radch, but broke away from it during violent conflict. “You were fleeing the Radchaai fleet, weren’t you?” I say into a gap of silence. “You went into a gate, right before a Radchaai ship destroyed it. You’ve been in suspension for a long, long time.”

The silence stretches, and then Ad’Norskel says, “We are twenty thousand light years and ten centuries away from home. How do you know our language?”

“I am a scholar,” I say. It has been a long time since I last lied about myself, but the habit returns easily. “I visited Votis in my travels, and learned Eobun from scholars there.”

“You’ve been to our planet?” The wariness in her voice is overlaid by longing. “What is it like, now?”

In fact, I have not returned to Votis since the Annexation. I rarely ever return. “Most places change, over centuries,” I say, evasively. “I doubt you would recognize your home, now.”

I hear her take a ragged breath. “I expect so,” she says. “Will you help us?”

“Yes,” I say. This is the difficult part. “We are military. My soldiers are armed. Remain calm, and I promise we will take all of you to safety. I give you my personal assurance that I will do everything in my power to assist you.” 

“I have no choice but to believe you,” she says, and it’s not what I wanted to hear but it will have to do. 

We dock. The pilot, Etrepa Two, is prepared to stay with the shuttle, but I order her with us. Unlike Seivarden, she makes no protest about regulations. Neither does Lieutenant Ekalu, who is more stressed than Seivarden was, at this point. “Do not, under any circumstances, speak Radchaai in the presence of this ship’s crew,” I tell my soldiers, and they salute me. Di’Skel meets us, escorts us to the bridge. She is warier of me, because I have my gun unholstered in my hand. 

When we reach the bridge I aim it at Mariska. My soldiers, following my lead, draw their own weapons, aiming them at the other two Votans. “Put any weapons you are carrying in the air between us,” I say. 

Mariska hands over her gun without taking her eyes from me. They burn with fear and hatred. I remember the satisfaction I took in hurting her, what feels like five hours ago. I should regret that. 

“Nil and I aren’t armed,” Ad’Norskel says. I wish I had the data to know if she was lying. But I believe her. I indicate to Etrepa Two that she should take the gun from where it’s floating in the air. 

“We don’t have anything to offer you,” the captain says, but I see the fear in her eyes. She knows that she has at least one thing: fifty-three potential ancillary bodies. 

“We are not pirates,” I tell her. “We have had bad experiences with weapons recently. I only wish to avoid a repeat incident.” 

I don’t know if she believes me. I hope she does. People who believe they are going to the undeath of a troop carrier’s storage holds are people with nothing to lose. 

Suddenly, I very much do not want to be here, pointing a gun at a frightened face. But my arm does not move. “Our shuttles can hold twenty at a time,” I say. “Can you organize your people by those most in need of medical care, and begin to move them aboard?”

She nods, and goes to her terminal. Begins making calls.

Nil, the white-haired person, drifts over to me. She has the thinness that comes to some humans with age, and her eyes seem large in her narrow face. “You are Captain Breq?” I nod. “I am Navigator Nil. It will be good to be on a ship with working climate control. I’m not sure how much longer I could take this heat.” 

“Pardon me for saying this, Navigator Nil,” I say, “but you don’t seem as intimidated by us as your coworkers.”

She laughs dryly. “What are you going to do, shoot me? I lived through two invasions, boy. My parents were killed in front of me when I was only a child. I tried to make a life for myself on Votan, but the Radchaai came there too. All I care about now is being a little more comfortable before I die.”

“Two invasions?” I ask. Eobun has no precise word that translates to _ Annexation _, and I can’t imagine Nil would use it if there was one. 

She shrugs, shoulders sharp as knives. “I was born on Ilvan,” she says. “I don’t know if you know where that is.”

I do. 

I remember a city where the people cared so much about music that their choirs were surgically altered to have vocal cords of the correct intervals of length. A child told me about it, as she played in the rubble of what had once been the opera house. 

There was another child, who watched her parents die.

There were thousands of children, over the millenia. 

I remember all of them. 

Nil coughs.

She’s in poor physical condition. She needs to be one of the twenty first on the shuttle. And I cannot send her to _Mercy of Kalr,_ full of people speaking Radchaai, people who were Radchaai four years ago. Not without me along to watch her. 

I don’t want to be on a small crowded shuttle for an hour with her. I don’t want to be on a ship with her for the two-day trip back to Athoek Station. But what I want matters very little. 

“Let me help you to our shuttle,” I say.

She waves my hand away. “I’m not helpless yet,” she says, and pushes off from the wall. I follow her. Through my connection to our ship I signal Ekalu and Etrepa Two to stay with the captain, and for Seven and Nine to come with me. 

“Captain,” _Mercy of Kalr_ says, “I have just lost contact with the shuttle.” 

I push off as hard as I can, and propel myself at speed down the corridor. Too late. The outer door of the airlock tells me that there is nothing on the other side but the void. 

Di’Skel. 

It wasn’t a technical issue, causing the explosion. It was Seivarden putting up more of a fight than Di’Skel expected. 

Mercy of Kalr gives me sensor data. The shuttle is headed for _Mercy of Kalr_, at frankly unsafe speeds. 

Di’Skel’s communication is relayed to me from _Mercy of Kalr_’s internal frequencies. “I will destroy any shuttle attempting to dock with the Silent Star,” she says. “Fix our ship, or you’ll suffocate with us.”

“She shouldn’t have been able to take my shuttle,” _Mercy of Kalr_ says. “Something is wrong.”

Seivarden, on Mercy of Kalr’s command deck but headed towards the second shuttle bay, pauses her run to say, “What the fuck does she think she’s doing? Even if you can fix that bucket, there’s nowhere for them to run to.” 

“She’s not thinking anything,” I say, murmuring the words quietly enough that Nil can’t hear me, knowing that _Mercy of Kalr_ will amplify them for Seivarden. “She’s afraid.” 

“Doesn’t excuse idiocy,” Seivarden grumbles. 

“Seivarden,” I say, “what are you doing?”

“Idiot or not,” Seivarden pants, starting to jog again, “I’m not going to shoot her down. We need both those shuttles to get everyone off that sorry excuse for a ship before it disintegrates. I can cut my way in from the outside.” 

_Mercy of Kalr_ reads my appalled rejection before I speak, and cuts me off. I’ve run the calculations, Fleet Captain. I can match velocity with the shuttle. Lieutenant Seivarden has done similar maneuvers before.” 

Send someone else sticks in my throat. Send who? I would be the person to send, and I’m not there. No one else has as good a chance as Seivarden. 

Seivarden arrives at the airlock and pauses in front of the suit lockers, waiting for my approval.

I can’t find it in me to speak it. I give my permission inaudibly to _Mercy of Kalr_. 

Half an hour later, Seivarden is dying again. It is not as quick this time. I wedge myself between two walls in the Silent Star’s dirty outer airlock and wait, and wait, and wait-

I am lying in bed. Medical alerts are flashing in my vision. 

Seivarden wakes, rolls upright, opens her eyes. “Fleet Captain,” she says.

“I’m all right, Ship.” I concentrate on slowing my breathing, my heart rate. I wish, I wish, I wish that I have more bodies, that I am what I once was. 

The warnings blink out, filing my reactions under “nightmare”. Maybe this is only that. Humans are sometimes trapped in never ending nightmares from which they cannot awake on their own. This did not use to be a problem for me, who was never on my own. 

Now I am more alone than I have ever been. Alone even in my movement through time.

0600\. Two hours until the distress call.

I tell _Mercy of Kalr_ to place Ekalu in temporary command. I ask it not to disturb me for any reason for the next two hours.

“Breq?” Seivarden asks, puzzled.

I distract her. 

When we began occasionally having sex, ten months ago, our activities had mimicked, as closely as I could manage, the kinds of sexual contact I had enjoyed with my ancillaries. A relief of tension and a fulfilling of the need for skin to skin contact. 

This time, what we do is not that.

“Aatr’s tits,” Seivarden breathes, an hour later, as I roll off of her, onto my back where I can stare up at the featureless white ceiling. “Is it my birthday and I didn’t notice? What was that about?”

Fifty minutes left. 

I wash. I let Kalr Five dress me. I go down to the shuttle bays and examine the security systems for any flaw. I don’t find any.

“Fleet Captain,” says Kalr Eight, for _Mercy of Kalr_, “I’ve received a distress call.”

Seivarden peers at my sheets of writing. She’s unaccustomed to reading handwriting; outside of ornamental calligraphy, the practice isn’t common in the Radch, or in the Republic for that matter. 

“The second time,” she says. “I was attacked by this… Nils person.” She does an impressive job at mispronouncing a one syllable name. 

“Yes.”

“She was from Ilvan.” 

“Yes.”

_Mercy of Kalr_ is sending me Seivarden’s data, the changes happening in her emotions, but I find I have difficulty concentrating on anything. 

“Breq,” Seivarden says. “Tell me what you think is happening.”

She had no moment of doubt, when I told her what I was experiencing. I think she’d believe anything I told her. 

“It’s possible someone has hacked into my implants, and is putting me through some kind of simulation,” I say. “I can’t imagine why, but the technology exists on some planets I know of.” 

“Perhaps you should figure out what they want you to do, then, and do it,” Seivarden says, and then laughs, but the sound isn’t one of amusement. “What am I even saying. This is you we’re talking about.” 

“What would you do?” I ask. “If this were happening to you?”

Her heartrate spikes. She laces her gloved fingers together in her lap. “Maybe this Nils person is supposed to kill me,” she says. “Maybe you just need to let it happen.” 

I don’t say anything.

“I probably did kill her parents,” she says. “And I can’t even remember.”

_You didn’t,_ I think. _I did. _

I don’t say it.

“I know you believe in coincidences, Breq, but really… none of us can run from justice forever.” 

I don’t let things happen. Not any more. 

0600.

“Fleet Captain, I’m receiving a distress call.”

It occurs to me for the first time that I could ignore it. Could order my ship to continue on to Athoek.

Would it- would my crew- obey such an order? 

I’m afraid that they would. 

I could tell Medic that I’m sick. Hand over command to Seivarden. Hand over command to Ekalu, and have Seivarden stay with me, locked in my cabin until the day is over. 

Leave fifty-three people to die. If I can’t succeed in saving them, my crew can’t either. 

“Breq,” Seivarden says. She’s in my bed, asleep. She’s on the Silent Star, a gun in her hand, dead. 

I am awake.


End file.
